The Little Girl Mistakes Water Heater for Robot video is a dangerous lie

This week's blog post is by The Paternity Test co-host Matt Boresi, who lives in the Edgewater Glen neighborhood of Chicago with his wife (“Professor Foster”) and their 5-year-old daughter, Viva, who believes in only one rule of robotics: Fear the Robots.

If you are a parent or a fan of the Internet, I have little doubt your inbox and social media feed are already full of today's hot distraction: a video in which a toddler mistakes a water heater on a curb for a robot. She greets it and gives it a big hug. To borrow the words of the guy who knows more about fraud than anybody: FAKE NEWS!

That video is pro-robot disinformation and that girl is either a robot herself, or has already been squished* by the water heater and replaced by a robot.

I get it, you need a moment's break from the news of carpet bombings, spy rings, plummeting markets, and, of course, the never-ending internal drum beat of your life's failings filling your ears, but hogwash about benevolent machines befriending little girls isn't the way to turn your frown upside down. Go stress eat or something, and never forget that robots are the enemy.

My daughter, Viva, has hated robots since nearly birth, and indeed her first sentence was, “Min-Mou, Bye Bye!” Which meant, “Take this crawling Minnie Mouse robot away and put it in our robot gulag closet before it strangles us.” She saw the writing on the wall. Robots are stronger than us, faster than us, smarter than us and made of metal. Metal! You are made of Portillo’s and they are made of steel. That makes you delicious and them … unstoppable.

Uber even suspended its self-driving car problem for the past two days (the program is back on today), after a crash they say was caused by a human driver. The robots have already learned to assign blame.

Westworld. Humans. Ex Machina. Her. Age of Ultron. Those who do not learn from pretend history are doomed to live it!

And I ask you, while your innate sense of pareidolia makes you see big, soulful, Johnny 5-like eyes on that water heater, why is there a water heater on the curb? DID IT JUST ESCAPE FROM THE HOUSE, OR IS IT TRYING TO GET IN?!! There is no good answer to that question.

So, go on. Click on the video. “Squee” to the adorableness, but know this: Water heaters can't love you. Water heaters have no soul.

*Safety note: Don’t let your toddler hug strange water heaters on the curb. Water heaters are extremely heavy and could smash your child flat. If G.I. Joe’s jungle trooper Recondo taught you in the ‘80s not to hide in discarded refrigerators, let this regional parenting comedy blogger teach you not to hug discarded water heaters. Knowing is half the battle.

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